The Shadow Court

by Stark, Jenn

  “I never made any assertion to the contrary,” Armaeus responded smoothly. “The balance of magic must be maintained at all times, yes. But as long as that is assured, I’d be a fool not to use the benefit of my position to protect those who should be protected.”

  The comment wasn’t untrue, but it still made me blink. I was used to the other members of the Arcana Council being mercenary, and I certainly made no excuses for my own avarice. But Armaeus had always seemed above that fray, separate and apart from righting the petty wrongs of ordinary men.

  What was going on here?

  “We can speak more comfortably elsewhere in the house, I think,” Armaeus said, watching me closely. “If you’ll follow me?”

  I didn’t meet his gaze, fixing my attention instead on a richly textured oil painting of Venus, clearly an original. “Sure.”

  He turned and moved silently through the house, his expensive Italian loafers making barely any noise on the polished floor. In comparison, I clomped behind him in my scuffed boots, driving my hands farther into my jacket pockets. I found myself thinking thoughts I hadn’t dredged up since the very early days with Armaeus—mostly about how someone like him would be interested in someone like me…and why.

  Those doubts had been answered early on, of course. The Magician had never had any compunction about explaining to me that his interest in me had started on an entirely professional note. He wanted to understand my unusual psychic abilities and how deep they went, particularly because I was one of the few human beings whose mind he could not immediately read. He was more than willing to use his own psychic skills to help with the discernment of mine—with the somewhat awkward caveat that his aptitudes were intensified and driven by sex. And once he’d realized that I’d reacted very strongly to the spark of attraction he was naturally inclined to fan between us—and that this spark had ignited a very different fire within me, one that expanded my abilities—he’d continued to push me to push my limits, break through my blocks, and achieve my potential.

  After that…well, here we were. Quite the raggedy pair.

  We reached the back of the mansion what seemed like fifteen minutes later, though I’m sure was only five, the sound of my boots thudding in my ears. I stepped out onto a gracious back porch where a low table was set with coffee service and more pastries, the delicious smell of freshly baked bread wafting up.

  “You have a staff here?” I asked, recalling Nikki’s insistence that nobody was moving inside the house.

  “I do,” Armaeus allowed. “And I have a highly sophisticated security system which, as of a few short hours ago, thwarts the abilities of even the Fool to circumvent at short notice. Fortunately, I won’t have to deceive Simon for long, but I wanted at least a few hours to get to know the place again. Do you have anything else you would like to ask me about my home?”

  Armaeus’s voice retained its edge of humor, enough that I had to force myself not to become irritated on general principles. He was fully aware I was offering filler conversation, questions, and thoughts to crowd the space between us, creating a buffer. Well, too bad. I needed that buffer.

  “I’m good.” I moved forward and took a seat nearest to the coffee. I’d rather be jacked to the nines than stuffed senseless, and I was definitely going to need something to distract me. Armaeus swept up beside me and settled into the next chair, but instead of leaning back, he moved forward, his hands on his knees, studying me.

  I had to laugh. “I know that look,” I sighed. “Even if you don’t remember it anymore.”

  His brows arched. “Oh?”

  “It used to make me feel like you were studying a bug.”

  “And now?”

  “It still feels like you’re studying a bug, but it bothers me less. When we first met, I never quite knew if I was a distraction, a curiosity, or a genuine puzzle to you. Probably a little of all three.” There. I’d done it. I’d broached the idea of me and him, together. Of us. My heart had started thudding nervously, my hands were sweating, and my breath didn’t seem to be filling my lungs, but I’d done it. I totally deserved a parade. With trombones.

  “At the beginning, I suspect it was all three,” Armaeus agreed. He sat back and crossed his legs, still eyeing me curiously. “I have talked to Kreios about you, and I know the timeline of our relationship, if that helps.”

  I took a sip of the killer rich espresso, my last barrier to the morass of crazy I was about to fall into. “And what did Kreios have to say?”

  “The bare minimum. Though he worried excessively that he wouldn’t be present when we finally had the opportunity to become reacquainted. The truths that might come out intentionally or unintentionally and all that.”

  “Right.” I snorted. Leave it to the Devil to put things into perspective. I was making this a bigger deal than it needed to be. “So let’s get to it. Why did you forget me?”

  The words were out in the air between us before I could stop them. That wasn’t how I wanted to ask this question, that wasn’t even really the most important question I needed to ask. But once spoken, I couldn’t recall the words, and as I stared resolutely at Armaeus, I was at least glad to note that my voice hadn’t wavered. Much.

  “I don’t know,” he said evenly, meeting my gaze. The sensual flicker in his eyes was gone, and his expression was both neutral and mildly fascinated, neither of which I found at all reassuring. I clenched my fists in my lap, willing myself not to be an idiot, but it was tough going.

  Armaeus continued. “The options are certainly intriguing. Did I remove you from my awareness because of your role as Justice? Because of some shared memory that was clouding my understanding of our current dilemma? Or did I plan it at all?”

  “You had to have planned it in part,” I replied, striving to keep my voice even and rational. “There was a letter written to Justice the first time you pulled this stunt in 1478, which said if I was receiving it, then I was also the key to the solution. But that’s all it said: if you’re getting this note, you’re a critical part of the solution. Which, for the record, that wasn’t super helpful.”

  “Noted.”

  “And then there’s the history of the Mercault family and their assertion that you’ve done this at least twice that they know of.” I didn’t even hesitate to share this additional information. Armaeus was already out in the field, regardless of whether or not he should be. He needed to know what I knew about his lost memories. “In 1478, as we already determined, and in 1571. Any chance either of those lapses makes sense now? And have you any idea what you forgot besides me this time around?”

  “First, let’s address the present,” he said, lifting an elegant finger. “From what I have determined based on accounts of the incident in Dublin, I was pumped full of energy from the ancients in a bid to short out my circuits, to overwhelm me, you could say. That didn’t work. I kept taking more and more energy, but not dispelling it. From everything we’ve charted, my brain activated and replicated cells to manage the influx of energy, creating new compartments. But that energy was unformed, unfocused. It wasn’t a learning, it was only a potentiality. When I understood I had forgotten you, I assumed it was simply an overflow issue. That I had to remove something in my mind in order to make room for something else. But I could find no other incidence of a forgotten set of information besides all memories attached to you—yet I sensed incontrovertibly that I had forgotten something else. Then I realized, as you say, that I had done this before. Twice before, in fact. With that, the situation became a little…murkier.”

  “But how would you know whether you’ve forgotten something new or not this time?” I asked. “You wouldn’t know you couldn’t tie your shoes anymore until you attempted to tie your shoes.”

  He smiled. “True. But it appears that after the second excision of my memories in 1571, I undertook a rigorously detailed inventory of everything I could remember, everything I’d ever studied or written down. So that I would know if it ever happened to me again, especially
if it had been done to me unawares.”

  I squinted at him. “Unawares? Were you worried about that?”

  He spread his hands, his eyes glittering. “I worry about very little. I consider everything.”

  “Okay, fine. So, let me guess. When this happened again, you created an SAT test for yourself, and you passed with flying colors. Except for anything categorized under Wilde, Sara.”

  “Exactly,” Armaeus said. “Or that is what I thought. Until I saw the first picture you texted.”

  “The woman who attacked me, the one with the partial tattoo.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you realized that you didn’t know the symbol, but should have?”

  “No,” he said, surprising me. “I realized I did know the symbol, but that I shouldn’t.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up my coffee mug, not willing to release its velvety goodness just because my head was exploding. “Explain.”

  Armaeus leaned forward, consumed with an energy that seemed strange for him—too intense, too excited. I’d always considered him the soul of restraint, but how well did I really know the true Armaeus? Would I ever know him fully?

  Or, for that matter…ever again?

  The Magician’s eyes flashed as he began. “Simply stated, I instantly recognized the symbol. Once I did, I understood the true nature of the problem we now face. A problem that I had not recognized as it was building virtually in front of me for centuries.”

  “You know what, I don’t think I have enough caffeine for this,” I said, slumping back in my chair. “So this has nothing to do with you forgetting me.”

  “It has a great deal to do with it, in fact. I believe that it was only because I forced myself to forget you that I was able to see the truth.”

  I squinted at him. “But I haven’t been around for centuries. I’ve only been in your life for a couple years. How could that help?”

  “You have not been around for centuries, no. But you are Justice of the Arcana Council, the first Justice since the mid-1800s, a position vacated by Abigail Strand and not refilled until you took up the role.”

  “And…”

  “And having forgotten you, I find that I now remember a great deal more about Madame Abigail Strand than I did previously.”

  My eyes shot wide. The former Justice had remained a mystery to me in many ways, but I hadn’t considered there’d been any nefarious reason for that. “I just assumed you were holding out on me.”

  “Not at all. My memories of Abigail Strand were hazy—she died well over a hundred years ago. But they were intact, or so I believed. I knew the bare minimum about her—her tenure with our organization was brief and troubled, and I brought her into the Council during a tumultuous time. I couldn’t exactly remember the nature of that tumult, but it was the Victorian era, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and there was significant global unrest. The entire world was in a state of extraordinary transition, including those of the Connected community. Then Justice Strand died, and I felt in part to blame, so you could argue that I repressed my memories of her further to somewhat absolve myself of the damage I’d caused to an innocent.”

  “Okayyy…” I watched the Magician carefully. He was right that Justice Strand, my immediate predecessor for all that she’d ended her tenure in 1853, had died far too young. Abigail had endured myriad mental challenges that had made it difficult to cope with her work as Justice, and the role had proven too much for her. Of course, I’d learned this well after it had become too late for me to leave said role, but details.

  Armaeus clearly knew something I didn’t, however. He was practically vibrating with energy, the energy of a mad scientist on the cusp of a major revelation, and one I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “And that means…” I prompted him.

  “The symbol that you saw inked on the neck of your adversary is something that jogged my memory, but I was shocked to learn that I had no record of it in my files. Not one. But I did find examples of it here. In this house. A house I’d quit rather suddenly in 1853 for no discernible reason, and to which I’d never returned. Never truly thought of, in fact, until earlier today, with the revelation of that symbol.”

  “And it’s a symbol of what, exactly?” I pulled my phone out and scanned the photos. The tattoo was there, of course, but now that I saw it again, I had to frown. “Um, how did we even get a tattoo out of that? It barely looks like more than a bad rash.”

  “Detective Rooks thought the same thing, but he cannot see the way you and I can see, when we make the attempt. In the exigency of the moment, you utilized the sight of your third eye.”

  “Oh.” Obligingly, I flicked open that lens, and I saw the tattoo much more clearly. But that also explained why the woman had felt comfortable displaying it—most people couldn’t see it, even the bit that showed above the woman’s high collar, so she was effectively hidden in plain sight. Fortunately, my sight wasn’t exactly plain.

  “So it’s a crown of some sort, super stylized. I remember now,” I murmured. “What’s the connection? You said you know it.”

  “I knew it would be a truer statement. This symbol was employed by a rival council. An ancient adversary of the Arcana Council that we had destroyed in…let me see. The Bronze Age, originally, well before my time. Then again in the 1300s, just after my ascension. Then again in the mid-1400s.”

  I shot him a glance. “I think you’re misunderstanding the word destroyed.”

  He continued without acknowledging that. “After the blow we leveled in the 1400s, there was no rebuilding of the organization. You could say we salted the earth they stood upon, utilizing every tool at our disposal, as they had used similar tools against us.”

  “Kind of intense for an Arcana throwdown, wouldn’t you say?”

  “They more than deserved it. The Shadow Court supported some of the most perverse Connected criminals of the Middle Ages, and it became clear they weren’t going to stop unless we made them. At that time, Justice Hall overflowed with complaints of their actions against Connecteds—enslavement, torture, death, mutilation—and they sat on piles of gold, which made them far too influential with both governments and the Church.”

  “Hmmm,” I muttered. The library of Justice Hall would have qualified as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, if anyone had known it existed outside the Arcana Council. In addition to being the repository for all crimes against Connecteds perpetrated by other Connecteds since the dawn of time, the library had also become home to certain arcane texts and treatises, the more dangerous, the better. “The Shadow Court. I haven’t heard of them.”

  “You wouldn’t. That’s the point. They were old news.” The Magician shook his head wonderingly. “I’d forgotten all this, but there was no reason for me to remember it, specifically, as something to be concerned about. The Shadow Court was gone. They remained gone, an artifact of the past that was well and truly vanquished. Until the mid-1800s, it would seem, when they reached out to Abigail Strand, and she helped them by removing any current awareness of the Shadow Court from my memory. I knew they had existed and that they were destroyed, but I had no idea they had resurfaced. Or, I should say, I apparently had become aware they had resurfaced, and then I had that awareness removed. By Justice Strand.”

  “What?” I blinked. Justice Abigail Strand was a bit of a cipher, admittedly, but she’d never impressed me as being incredibly strong. “She could do that?”

  “With the right amount of help, she could. She must have done so, in fact. When I removed my memories in 1478 and 1571, I must have directed Justice Hall to expunge any files regarding that which I no longer wanted anyone to know. When she ascended to the role of Justice, Abigail, in turn, must have somehow realized the break in the historical records, learned how it happened, and shared that knowledge with people who knew what to do with it. When new complaints surfaced and I refocused on the Shadow Court, she was given the tools to expunge my memory. And so it was done—done so exp
ertly, I never even noticed what I’d forgotten. Our enemies have had more than a hundred and fifty years to operate under our very noses without any checks or balances. They could be our friends, our colleagues, and all the while working assiduously to take the Council apart, brick by brick. And now, with me at my weakest, they are choosing to strike.”

  “That…doesn’t sound good,” I allowed.

  He looked at me. “It is not, Miss Wilde. The Shadow Court is about to destroy everything we have built—and send the world into chaos—and we’re almost too late to stop them.”

  Chapter Nine

  I stared at the Magician, both unwilling and unable to process so much crazy in one sentence. “They’ve got enough power to destroy the Council, and you didn’t realize this was going on right in front of you? All these years?”

  His mouth twitched with irritation. “Miss Wilde.”

  “Don’t you Miss Wilde me. You knew there were gaps in your mental history. Two big gaps at critical points during world history—not that there’s arguably any point during world history that isn’t critical, except for maybe the Dark Ages. Those were kind of a long stretch of simply trying not to die from the Plague.”

  “Miss Wilde.”

  “But it never occurred to you that a similar memory gap existed around the mid-1800s? With as much”—I floundered for a second, wanting to come up with a better term than navel-gazing, no matter how much it applied—“introspection as you subject yourself to, I think you would have stumbled over it.”

  “And you would be correct, in the main.” His gaze shifted to the wall again. “But even the pieces I knew were missing, I couldn’t entirely identify in terms of scope. That took decades—centuries of careful teasing out, often starting with the end in mind. Some aspect of the world that was there, and then, quite suddenly, not. A problem that was building toward an irrevocable conclusion that was never heard of again, that sort of thing. I didn’t conclude those efforts until this last, quite forceful period of, as you call it, introspection.”